Boston Hearing Delves Into FBI Alerts

By

Devlin Barrett

Updated May 9, 2013 5:19 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—Boston's police commissioner told Congress on Thursday that his department was never told of federal authorities' concerns about bombing suspect
Tamerlan Tsarnaev
before the April 15 marathon attack, but he said it wasn't clear advance knowledge would have changed anything.

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At the first congressional hearing examining the attack that killed three people and injured more than 200 others, Commissioner
Edward Davis
faced repeated questions from lawmakers on the House Homeland Security Committee about possible missed clues and intelligence gaps before the attacks.

In hindsight, he said, he would like to have been told about the Federal Bureau of Investigation's concerns about Mr. Tsarnaev in 2011 when Russian intelligence officials first brought the young man to U.S. authorities' attention. Mr. Davis said, however, that his detectives might have reached the same conclusion as federal agents did about Mr. Tsarnaev back then—that there was nothing suspicious about him, and no reason to keep investigating.

"If we knew everything that we know now," Mr. Davis said, "…we would have taken a hard look at these individuals, but at this point in time I can't say that if we knew things we would have done anything differently.''

Mr. Davis cautioned lawmakers that there may not be easy answers to the questions raised by the attack. "There's no computer that's going to spit out a terrorist name," he said, arguing that the most effective counterterrorism tool is citizens coming forward to police with concerns about individuals.Some terrorist plots will be successful, he said, "and I think as a nation we need to come to terms with it…The world is a dangerous place and I think we need to recognize it and be prepared for it."

Lawmakers said the bombing revealed failures within the nation's counterterrorism agencies, including intelligence-collecting from Russian authorities and managing U.S. databases of potential terrorists.

Rep.
Michael McCaul
(R., Texas), chairman of the committee, said it is still unclear whether the plot was directed by overseas terrorists, but "we certainly know it was foreign-inspired."

"My fear is that the Boston bombers may have succeeded because our system failed," he said. "We must do better."

After the hearing, the head of the FBI's Boston office, Richard DesLauriers, issued a statement describing the FBI and Boston police department's work together on a joint-terrorism task force, where police detectives had access to a database with the details of the FBI's inquiry into Mr. Tsarnaev.

Mr. DesLauriers said the FBI's assessment of Mr. Tsarnaev was "thorough, comprehensive, and fully compliant with law and policy," adding that it was one of about 1,000 such assessments the Boston task force conducted that year.

Authorities say Mr. Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, planted homemade bombs in backpacks near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three days later, they allegedly killed a police officer, leading to a shootout that killed Tamerlan and badly wounded Dzhokhar, who was captured the following night.

"We cannot ignore that once again it has taken a tragedy to reveal problems in our vast, varied and numerous federal databases," said the senior Democrat on the panel, Rep.
Bennie Thompson
of Mississippi. He suggested that a more vigorous use of those databases might have led U.S. officials to block Tamerlan Tsarnaev's return to the U.S. in July2012 after a six-monthtrip to Russia.

The Russian inquiries led U.S. officials to place Tamerlan Tsarnaev on two different databases of potential terrorists. But the lists are so large—officials say one contains roughly a million different names—that a person's presence in the database isn't enough on its own to merit an investigation.

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